Kitabı oku: «The Gray Mask», sayfa 11

CHAPTER XVI
A NOTE FROM THE DEAD

Alsop was around the next day, loud with generosity, and anxious to give Garth the only form of reward he could understand – large sums of money. Garth, however, didn't care for the man. He preferred to keep their relations on a purely business basis.

"I only did my duty, Mr. Alsop," he said. "Some day I may break away from here and start an office of my own. In that case, if you cared to mention me to your friends I would feel I had been well repaid."

"Maybe you were a little too proud, Garth," the inspector grunted afterwards.

Nora, however, when she heard of it, said simply, "Jim, you did perfectly right. If you had taken money from that man he'd have believed he owned you body and soul."

"When you two combine against me I've nothing more to say," the inspector grinned.

Garth knew that the old man watched, with something like anxiety himself, the progress of his and Nora's friendship. The detective had long since made up his mind not to speak to the inspector on that subject until he had received some definite encouragement from the girl. The inspector himself brought up the matter about this time. Probably the impulse came from the trial of Slim and George which began and threatened, in spite of its clear evidence, to drag through several weeks.

It would be necessary, of course, for both Garth and Nora to testify sooner or later. So they rehearsed all the incidents of that night when Garth had worn the grey mask. After this exercise one evening the inspector followed Garth to the hall.

"I don't want my girl to become morbid, Jim."

Garth nodded.

"You mean Kridel?"

"You've said it," the big man answered with an attempt at a whisper. "I've thought that maybe you and Nora – See here, Jim, I wouldn't mind a bit. You see Nora's mother was Italian. I don't altogether understand her, but I know it isn't natural for her to mourn for this fellow forever, and I mean, if you and she ever hit it off, I won't forbid the banns. Only maybe you'll let me live with you now and then. You don't know what that girl means to me, Jim; but I want to make her happy, and I believe you're the one, for a blind, deaf, and dumb man could see you are in love with her."

Garth laughed, not altogether comfortably.

"It's up to Nora, chief, but I don't see how I can ever get along without her."

It wasn't often that the inspector had used Garth's first name. It seemed to bring the detective closer to his goal. During the daytime at headquarters, however, their relations were scarcely altered. Garth often suffered from lack of work there, probably because the inspector didn't care to send him out on unimportant matters that the least imaginative of his men could handle. When he had to assign him to an unpromising task, either to spare him too prolonged idleness, or because no other detective was available, the big man always assumed an apologetic air. It was so when he started him on the mystifying Taylor case.

"Nothing doing these days," he grumbled. "City must be turning pure, Garth. Anyway I got to give it something for its money. Run up and take a look at this suicide. Seems Taylor was a recluse. Alone with his mother-in-law and the servants. Wife's in California. Suppose you had other plans, but I don't see why the city should pay you to talk moonshine to Nora."

He grinned understandingly, encouragingly.

So the detective nodded, strolled up town, and with a bored air stepped into that curious house.

Garth for a long time stared at the pallid features of the dead man. Abruptly his interest quickened. Between the thumb and forefinger of the clenched left hand, which drooped from the side of the bed, a speck of white protruded. The detective stooped swiftly. The hand, he saw, secreted a rough sheet of paper. He drew it free, smoothed the crumpled surface, and with a vast incredulity read the line scrawled across it in pencil.

"Don't think it's suicide. I've been killed – "

There was no more. Until that moment Garth had conceived no doubt of the man's self-destruction. The bullet had entered the left side of the breast. The revolver lay on the counterpane within an inch of the right hand whose fingers remained crooked. The position of the body did not suggest the reception or the resistance of an attack. In the room no souvenir of struggle survived.

Here was this amazing message from the dead man. Its wording, indeed, offered the irrational impression of having been written after death.

Garth thought rapidly. Granted its accusation, the note must have been scrawled between the firing of the shot and the moment of Taylor's death. But a murderer, arranging this appearance of suicide, would have given Taylor no opportunity. On the other hand, the theory that Taylor had written the note before killing himself, perhaps to direct suspicion to some innocent person, broke down before the brief wording, its patent incompleteness. One possibility remained. Garth could imagine no motive, but another person might have prepared the strange message.

A number of books littered the reading table at the side of the bed. Garth examined them eagerly. He found a blank page torn from one – the sheet which Taylor had clenched in his fingers. In another was Taylor's signature. When Garth had compared it with the message on the crumpled paper no doubt remained. Taylor himself had written those obscure and provocative words.

Garth found the pencil on the floor beneath the bed, as if it had rolled there when Taylor had dropped it. The place at the moment had nothing else to offer him beyond an abnormally large array in the bath room of bottles containing for the most part stimulants and sedatives. They merely strengthened, by suggesting that Taylor was an invalid, his appearance of suicide.

The coroner and Taylor's doctor, who came together, only added to the puzzle. The coroner declared unreservedly for suicide, and, in reply to Garth's anxious question, swore that no measurable time could have elapsed between the firing of the shot, which had pierced the heart, and Taylor's death. The physician was satisfied even after Garth confidentially had shown him the note.

"Mr. Taylor," he said then, "understood he had an incurable trouble. Every one knows that his wife, whom he worshipped, had practically left him by going to California for so long. It may have appealed to a grim sense of humour, not unusual with chronic invalids, to puzzle us with that absurdly worded note. I might tell you, too, that Mr. Taylor for some time had had a fear that he might go out of his head. Perpetually he questioned me about insanity, and wanted to know what treatment I would give him if his mind went."

Garth, however, when they had left, went to the library on the lower floor and telephoned headquarters. The inspector agreed that the case held a mystery which must be solved.

Garth walked to the embrasure of a high colonial window. The early winter night was already thick above the world. The huge room was too dark. There was a morbid feeling about the house. He had noticed that coming in, for the place had offered him one of those contrasts familiar to New York, where some antique street cars still rattle over sonorous subways. The Taylor home was a large, colonial frame farmhouse which had eventually been crowded by the modern and extravagant dwellings of a fashionable up-town district. In spite of its generous furnishings it projected even to this successful and materialistic detective a heavy air of the past, melancholy and disturbing.

Garth sighed. He had made up his mind. The best way to get at the truth was to accept for the present the dead man's message at its face value. He turned on the single light above the desk in the center of the room. He arranged a chair so that the glare would search its occupant. He sat opposite in the shadow and pressed a button. Almost at once he heard dragging footsteps in the hall, then a timid rapping at the door. The door opened slowly. A bent old man in livery shuffled across the threshold. It was the servant who had admitted Garth on his arrival a few minutes earlier. The detective indicated the chair on which the light fell.

"Sit down there, please."

As the old man obeyed his limbs shook with a sort of palsy. From his sallow and sunken face, restless, bloodshot eyes gleamed.

"I understand from the doctor," Garth began, "that you are McDonald, Mr. Taylor's trusted servant. The coroner says death occurred last night or early this morning. Tell me why you didn't find the body until nearly four o'clock this afternoon."

The old servant bent forward, placing the palm of his hand against his ear.

"Eh? Eh?"

On a higher key Garth repeated his question. McDonald answered in tremulous tones, clearing his throat from time to time as he explained that because of his master's bad health his orders had been never to disturb him except in cases of emergency. He drew a telegram from his pocket, passing it across to Garth.

"Mrs. Taylor is on her way home from California. I don't think Mr. Taylor knew just what connection she would make at Chicago, but he expected her to-morrow. That telegram sent from the train at Albany says she will be in this afternoon on the Western express. I thought it my duty to disturb him and get him up to welcome her, for he was very fond of her, sir. It will be cruel hard for her to find such a welcome as this."

"Then," Garth said, "you heard no shot?"

McDonald indicated his ears. Garth tugged at his watch chain.

"I must know," he said, "more about the conditions in this house last night."

He had spoken softly, musingly, yet the man, who had displayed the symptoms of a radical deafness, glanced up, asking without hesitation:

"You don't suspect anything out of the way, sir?"

Garth studied him narrowly.

"I want to know why the shot wasn't heard. You were here and Mr. Taylor's mother-in-law. Who else?"

The bony hand snapped to McDonald's ear again.

"Eh? Eh?"

"Speak up," Garth said impatiently. "Who was in the house besides yourself and Mrs. Taylor's mother?"

"The cook, Clara, sir – only the cook, Clara."

"You're sure?"

"Absolutely, sir. Who else should there be? We've been short of servants lately."

Garth dismissed him, instructing him to send Mrs. Taylor's mother. While he waited he stared from the window again, jerking savagely at his watch ribbon. From McDonald he had received a sharp impression of secretiveness. He hadn't cared to arouse the servant's suspicions. Through strategy he might more surely learn whatever the old man had held back.

Garth swung around with a quick intake of breath. He had heard no one enter. Through the obscurity, accented rather than diminished by the circular patch of light around the chair, he could see no one. Yet almost with a sense of vibration there had reached him through the heavy atmosphere of the old house an assurance that he was watched from the shadows. Impulsively he called out:

"Who's that?"

He stepped to the desk so that he could see the portion of the room beyond the light. It was empty. Garth, as such things go, had no nerves, but through his bewilderment a vague uneasiness crept.

He sprang back, turning. A clear, girlish laugh had rippled through the dusk. A high, girlish voice had challenged him.

"Here I am! Hide and seek with the policeman!"

He saw, half hidden in the folds of the curtain at the side of the embrasure in which he had stood, a figure, indistinct, clothed evidently in black. He took it for granted McDonald had sent the girl, Clara, first.

"I wanted Mr. Taylor's mother-in-law," he said. "No matter. Come here, and let me remind you that humor is out of place in a house of death."

Nevertheless the pleasant laugh rippled again. Slowly the dark figure detached itself from the shadows and settled in the chair while Garth watched, his uneasiness drifting into a blank unbelief. He couldn't accept the girlish laughter, the high, coquettish voice as having come from the grey, witch-like hag whom the light now exposed mercilessly.

"I am Mr. Taylor's mother-in-law," she said laughingly. "Everybody's surprised because I'm so youthful. My daughter's coming home this afternoon. That's why I'm so happy. They wouldn't let me go west with her, but when one's as advanced as I young people don't bother much."

Garth experienced a quick sympathy, yet behind the mental deterioration of extreme old age something useful might lurk.

"You slept in the front part of the house last night," he tried. "You probably heard the shot."

She shook her head. Her sunken mouth twitched in a smile a trifle sly.

"Once I drop off it would take a cannonade to wake me up."

For no apparent reason her youthful and atrocious laugh rippled again.

"Please," Garth said gently. "Mr. Taylor – "

"At my age," she broke in, "you say when a younger person dies: 'Ha, ha! I stole a march on that one.'"

She arose and with a curious absence of sound moved towards the door.

"I must go now. I am knitting a sweater. It was for my son-in-law. Now that he's put himself out of the way it might fit you."

The door closed behind her slender figure, and Garth tugged at his watch ribbon, wondering. Her actions had been too determined, her last words too studied. They had seemed to hold a threat. Was she as senile as she appeared, or had she tried to throw sand in his eyes?

He rang and sent for the cook Clara, unaware that a new and significant surprise awaited him in this dreary room. The girl, when she came, was young, and, in a coarse mold, pretty. When she sat down the light disclosed a tremulousness as pronounced as McDonald's. Before Garth could question her she burst out hysterically:

"I am going to leave this house. I was going to leave to-day, anyway."

Garth pitched his voice on a cold, even note.

"For the present you'll stay. Mr. Taylor didn't kill himself. He was murdered."

She covered her face with her hands, shivering.

"I didn't kill him. I didn't – "

"But," Garth snapped, "you know who did."

She shook her head with stubborn vehemence.

"I don't know anything," she answered, "except that I must leave this house."

"Why? Because you think the old lady's crazy, and she frightens you? I want to know about that."

As Clara lowered her hands the increased fear, rather than the tears in her eyes, held Garth. She shook her head again.

"I've only been here a week. I haven't seen much of her. She's only been to meals once or twice, and then she's scarcely said a word."

She glanced about the room with its small paned windows, its deep embrasures, its shallow ceiling.

"It isn't that," she whispered. "It's because the house is full of queer things. The servants all felt it. They talked about spirits and left. Five have come and gone in the week I've been here. But I've never been superstitious, and I didn't hear anything until last night."

Garth stirred.

"What did you hear? When was it?"

"About midnight," she answered tensely. "I had had company in the kitchen until then, so I was alone downstairs. McDonald had told me before he went to bed to make sure the last thing that the library fire was all right. I had looked at it and had put the fender up and was just leaving the room when I heard this sound – like moans, sir. I – I've never heard such suffering."

She shuddered.

"It was like a voice from the grave – like somebody trying to get out of the grave."

"But you heard no shot?"

"No, sir."

Garth spoke tolerantly.

"These sounds must have come from up stairs. You've forgotten that Mr. Taylor was an invalid."

She cried out angrily.

"It wasn't like a man's or a woman's voice, and I can't tell where it came from. I tell you it was like a – a dead voice."

"You failed to trace it, of course," Garth said. "Describe to me what you did."

"I ran to the kitchen," she answered, "but, as I told you, there was no one there. McDonald had gone to bed, and so had his daughter."

Garth stooped swiftly forward and grasped her arm.

"What's that you're saying? His daughter! You mean to tell me McDonald has a daughter, and she was in the house last night?"

She shrank from his excited gesture.

"Yes. He asked me not to tell you, but I'm frightened. I don't want to get in trouble. She's the housekeeper. She engages all the servants and runs the house."

"Then where is she now?"

"She must have gone out early this morning, sir, for I haven't seen her all day. I wanted to be fair. I've only been waiting for her to come back so I could tell her I was leaving."

"Send McDonald back to me," Garth said, "unless he's left the house, too."

The butler had deliberately lied to shield his daughter, and had asked secrecy of this girl. And all this talk of spirits and of cries! It was turning out an interesting case after all – possibly an abnormal one. Moreover, he was getting somewheres with it.

McDonald slipped in. He was more agitated than before. His face was distorted. His tongue moistened his lips thirstily. Against his will Garth applied the method he knew would bring the quickest result with such a man. He grasped the stooped shoulders. He shouted:

"Why did you lie when I asked you who was in the house at the time of the murder?"

"Eh? Eh?" the old man quavered.

"You're not as deaf as that. Where's your daughter now?"

"My ears!" the old servant whined. "I can't hear, sir."

"All right," Garth shouted. "If you want to go to the lockup and your daughter too, stay as deaf as you please."

He wasn't prepared for the revolting success that came to him. McDonald clutched at one of the window curtains and hid his twitching face in its folds, while sobs, difficult and sickening, tore from his throat, shaking his bent shoulders.

"God knows! I haven't seen her since I went to bed last night. I thought she'd gone out."

He glanced up, his face grimacing.

"Don't you think she did it. Don't you think – "

"First of all," Garth said, "I want her picture."

"I haven't any," McDonald cried.

But Garth hadn't missed the man's instinctive gesture towards his watch pocket. Then, whether he actually knew anything or not, he suspected his daughter and sought to protect her. Against his protests Garth took the watch and, as he had foreseen, found a photograph in the case. The picture was not of a young woman, but the face was still attractive in an uncompromising fashion. It was this hardness, this determination about the picture that made Garth decide that the original, under sufficient provocation, would be capable of killing.

"For her sake and yours, McDonald," Garth said, "answer one thing truthfully. Did she fancy herself any more than a superior servant? Had she formed for Mr. Taylor any silly attachment?"

McDonald's reply was quick and assured.

"To Mr. Taylor she was only a trusted servant, sir, and she knew her place."

The whirring of a motor suggested that an automobile had drawn up before the house. Garth slipped the photograph in his pocket.

"If that is Mrs. Taylor arriving," he said with an uncomfortable desire to shirk the next few minutes, "the news of her husband's death might come easier from you."

"I telephoned Mr. Reed," McDonald said. "He's an old friend of Mr. and Mrs. Taylor's. I told him about the telegram, and he's probably met her and brought her home."

"I will be here," Garth said, "if she wishes to speak to me."

CHAPTER XVII
THE KNIFE BY THE LIFELESS HAND

He heard McDonald open and close the front door. Then the widow entered, followed by a young man with an abundance of dark hair curling over a low forehead and shading eyes a trifle too deep set. But at first Garth saw only the widow, and he marveled that one so young and lovely in an etherial sense should have been mated with the elderly invalid upstairs. As he looked it suddenly occurred to him that Reed, since he had lost Taylor as a friend, might crave more than friendship from the widow.

She sank on a divan. Even in the shadows her heavy black hair and the dark grey traveling dress she wore heightened the weary pallor of her face. Had her eyes held tears they would have been easier to meet, for the shock was there, dry and unrelieved.

"It is dreadful to come home this way," she said, "dreadful! I had never dreamed of his doing such a thing."

"It is by no means certain," Garth said gently, "that he killed himself. There is a curious situation in this house. McDonald's daughter, the housekeeper, for instance, has not been seen since a short time before the crime."

Her lips twitched a little. He fancied hope in her eyes.

"If I could only cry!" she said. "At any rate that would be better for his memory, wouldn't it? You suspect this woman?"

"If you are able," Garth said, "I would like you to tell me something about her."

"I have never seen her," she answered. "She came after I went west. McDonald had a good deal of influence over Mr. Taylor, and I never quite trusted him. There's no use. You might as well know the truth about Mr. Taylor and me. You've probably heard. We were never quite happy. He was so much older. We never quite belonged to each other. But that is all. It isn't true all this gossip that I went west for a divorce, and I don't believe he was the man to kill himself. If there has been a crime against him I want the world to know it. I want his memory clean."

Quickly the man Reed touched her shoulder. For the first time since entering the room he spoke. His voice possessed a peculiar, aggressive resonance.

"Helen, you shouldn't take this man's suspicion that he was murdered too seriously."

Garth motioned him to silence.

"At such a time," he said to Mrs. Taylor, "I dislike to bother you, but I'd like to ask one or two questions. Your mother? Her mind?"

He caught a flash of pain across her white face.

"She has always been peculiar," she answered, "but she isn't out of her head, if that's what you mean. I've always thought it's a habit of hers to hide her real thoughts behind apparent absurdities."

"I had wondered about that," Garth said with satisfaction. "One more thing. There has been talk among the servants of spirits, of moans."

She shivered.

"I know nothing about that," she said, "except that the house is unbearable. That is one reason I decided on this long visit, why I shrank from coming home."

"Unbearable?" Garth helped her out.

"Old, moldy, and depressing. My husband, I think, believed in it a little. I've heard him and my mother talk about a figure who sometimes walked. I laughed at that, and I laughed when they heard moans. You see the wind often cries in the narrow space between us and the high wall of the next house. I've never liked it here. It depresses me too much. That's all."

"Thanks," Garth said. "You will want time to accustom yourself. Rest assured I will do everything I can to get the truth."

"You must," she said tensely, "and don't hesitate to disturb me if I can be of any use."

As they went out the resonance of Reed's undertone reached Garth.

"Helen. You are giving this man's suspicion too much weight. He seems to have no evidence."

After the door had closed Garth telephoned the inspector, suggesting that the house be guarded in order that he might have McDonald, Clara, and the old lady at hand.

"I'll give instructions," the throaty rumble of the inspector came back, "to arrest any one who tries to make a getaway."

Garth hurried to the kitchen. The night was nearly complete there, but, as he entered, he caught a swift, silent movement from the servants' stairs. He walked to the entrance.

"I thought so."

The girl Clara shrank from him in the shadows. She wore a hat and cloak. She carried a hand bag.

"If you don't want yourself locked up, charged with murder, take those things off," Garth said. "From this moment the house is watched, and any one attempting to leave will be arrested."

The girl commenced to cry again.

"I am afraid," she sobbed. "Afraid."

Garth turned on the light.

"Take me," he directed her, "to the room occupied by the housekeeper."

Shaken and uncertain, Clara led him to a room at the head of the stairs, which, Garth found, had a second door opening into the upper hall of the front portion of the house. The room displayed a taste seldom found among servants. His examination of it from the first spurred Garth's curiosity. The bed had been occupied last night, but to all appearances for only a brief period, since the blankets and sheets were little disturbed. Some clothing and a pair of shoes lay at one side, and clothing, shoes, and hats were neatly arranged in the closet, but nowhere could he find a dressing gown or a pair of bedroom slippers. Clara, moreover, could not recall having seen the housekeeper wear any hat or clothes other than those in the closet. If McDonald's daughter had fled from the house in slippers and dressing gown it was strange she hadn't been heard of long ago. It became increasingly clear to him that the woman remained hidden in the house. It should be easy enough to find her. He would search every corner for the one whose brain, he was now convinced, held the solution of the mystery. But on the lower floor he found no trace. He paused in the lower hall, intending to ring for McDonald to guide him through the rest of his task.

All at once his hand which he had raised to the bell hesitated. He braced himself against the wall. Through the heavy atmosphere a stifled groan had reached him, followed by a difficult dragging sound. But as he sprang up the stairs he knew he hadn't heard the cause of Clara's fright, for the groan had sufficiently defined itself as having come from a man.

In the upper hall there was no light beyond the glow sifting through the stair well. It was enough to show Garth a dark form huddled at the foot of the stairs leading to the third story. He ran over and stooped.

"McDonald! What's the matter? Are you hurt?"

The silence of the house was heavier, more secretive than before.

At last, in response to Garth's efforts, a whimpering came from McDonald's throat. The heap against the wall struggled impotently to rise. Garth recalled the medicines in Taylor's bath room and started down the hall. The unintelligible whimpering increased. Garth went on, aware that the black, huddled figure crawled after him with the sublime and unreasonable courage of a wounded animal.

He snapped on the light and ran to Taylor's bath room where he poured a stimulant into a glass. As he stepped back to the bedroom he faced Taylor's body on which the light shone with peculiar reflections. They gave to the pallid face the quality of a sneer. But it was only in connection with another radical difference at the bed that that illusion arrested Garth and sent a chill racing along his nerves. For on the counterpane, as near the crooked fingers as the revolver lay, now rested a long and ugly kitchen knife.

With a graver fear the detective glanced at the door of the hall. McDonald had dragged himself that far. He raised his trembling hand, stretching it towards the bed in a gesture, it seemed to Garth, of impossible accusation. Then the crouched figure toppled and fell across the threshold while from somewheres beyond the door a high girlish laugh rippled.

Garth sprang forward and knelt by the old man, reluctant to search for what he expected to find. There it was at the back of the coat, a jagged tear whose edges were stained, showing where the knife had penetrated the shoulder. The wound didn't look deep or dangerous, and in his unconsciousness McDonald breathed regularly. So Garth hurried back to the bed and examined the knife. There was no ambiguity about the red stains on the blade. The knife, resting close to the dead hand, had wounded McDonald who had seemed to accuse the still form whose note projected the impression of having been written after death.

Garth smothered his morbid thoughts. McDonald's daughter was the living force, probably at large in this house, that he wanted to chain. If she were guilty of the earlier crime she had sufficient motive for this attempt to keep the old man silent. She could have got such a knife from the kitchen. So, for that matter, could Clara. But the eccentric had laughed. Was that merely coincidence? Garth ran across the hall and listened at her door with an increasing excitement. He heard the running of water, regularly interrupted, as if by hands being cleansed under an open faucet. He tried the door and found it unlocked. He entered, staring at the daring indifference of the old woman who stepped from the bath room, calmly drying her hands on a towel.

"Come in, policeman," she said in her high girlish voice. "Don't suffer in the black hall."

"Let me have that towel," he cried.

Without hesitation she offered him the piece of linen. It showed no stains, nor were there stains to be found about the wash basin, but the slab of marble in which it was set was damp as if it had just now been carefully cleansed. She watched, her wrinkled face set in an expression of contempt.

"What are you up to? Think if I wanted to do anything wrong I'd let you find me out?"

"Then you know," he said, "what happened out there in the hall. I heard you laugh."

She started. Her voice was lower. At last it was as old as herself.

"Things always happen out there. It is crowded with the people who have lived in this house before us – unhappy and angry people. Often I have seen and heard the black thing out there. I would never laugh at her."

Again the doubt of her senility attacked him.

"You can't impress me with that," he said harshly. "I am talking about McDonald. He was stabbed out there a few minutes ago."

She laughed foolishly.

"Horrid old man! But why should I want to see him stabbed?"

He watched her closely.

"I saw you strike him. You didn't have enough strength to send the blow home."

The assurance of her voice increased his doubt. Whatever her mental state she was at least purposeful.

"You need glasses, policeman. Don't neglect your eyes. You have only one pair."

He felt himself against a blank wall, and there was McDonald to think of. He asked one more question.

"When did you last see McDonald's daughter?"

"Maybe at dinner last night," she said. "Nice girl, in spite of her father. I must go back to my knitting, policeman."